One of the leading experts in the field of marketing communications Philipp Volnov tells how to promote brands in the B2B segment and increase company profits with the help of marketing technologies.
Philipp has over 10 years of experience in promoting companies and automating communications. Leveraging his expertise in marketing communications automation and customer relations management, he guides businesses in finding and developing communication channels with customers. He led the development of communication marketing strategies for Crocs, METRO Cash & Carry, Burger King, Under Armor, 12 STOREEZ, The PuffCuff and other well-known brands and worked as a Head of Marketing Communications for Mindbox, the largest automation platform in Eastern Europe with more than 900 midsize and enterprise customers all across the Globe. And today he successfully consults clients of the American brand Maestra.
How did you start your career in marketing?
My career as a marketer started with DigDog, a boutique CRM agency, where I worked with Estee Lauder, Bobbi Brown, ClubMed, and Panasonic, after that I was invited for a Customer Success position at Mindbox, which is a marketing automation platform for businesses. We used it to help companies set up hundreds of automations with implementation of loyalty programs, personalized discounts, email communications, SMS and push messaging.
I spent the first few years leading client marketing automation projects and gradually became a leading customer success manager. I lead a management team that I hired and trained myself. And we worked with clients such as United Colors of Benetton, Crocs, Quicksilver, NVIDIA and others under my leadership.
The collaboration with Crocs has been one of my favorite projects. Together with the brand, I came up with a launch plan for the Russian market and a communications strategy, setting up automation flows for Crocs's customers to interact with the company, a total of 31 different flows across multiple channels in one month. And while Crocs requested not to reveal any figures of details, the company was very pleased with the result. This marked the start of a great friendship, as Crocs continued working with Minbox for over 4 years.
Moreover, I'm proud of my work with the clothing brand 12 STOREEZ. I started running this project when the brand only had 10,000 customers and manual mailings, but the customer base gradually grew to millions. In a few years we've set up an e-mail channel, SMS, web- and mobile-push, virtual wallets, product recommendations, website personalization and an omnichannel loyalty program.
Over time, I was appointed as Head of Marketing Communications in charge of Mindbox's marketing itself. I was tasked with building our marketing communications, particularly Event and PR.
What results have you achieved as the Head of Marketing Communications at Mindbox?
After that I was promoted to the position of the Head of Marketing Communications, coordinating the release of training materials in the media and webinars and launching profile sections at exhibitions and forums. One of my achievements is the fact that I organized the first "Valuable Marketing" conference in 2021 and 2022, which is the largest CRM-marketing event in the CIS and Eastern Europe. Extremely proud of that one! It featured C-level executives from Burger King, Benetton, X5 Retail Group and other global market leaders. At the same time, I coordinated other events: webinars with executives, business breakfasts, company stands at major exhibitions, for example, ECOM Expo with tens of thousands participants.
In total, my team initiated Mindbox's participation in over a hundred events, exhibitions and conferences which led to sales worth hundreds of millions and reinforced Mindbox's leading position as the best marketing automation solution in the CIS region.
In 2022, you moved to the US and together with your colleagues created Maestra, a new marketing automation company. Why did you choose the US as a country for doing business?
The US e-commerce and retail market is huge, it's about 20 times larger than the Russian one. Of course, if you are in the e-commerce segment, you don't need to register a company in the States, as it's much easier to work for the US market from another country. Cheaper, that is.
However, if you're B2B and your main clients are medium and large businesses, physical presence in the market is a must. Back from our experience of launching Mindbox in the UK, I remember that many deals fell through because companies didn't trust a new player who was very new to the market.
It takes face-to-face meetings to build trust and develop business relationships. It also requires quite a lot of time: from a couple of months to years. Potential clients in the UK favored companies that had clearly invested in the market: had a local office, local customer support, and actively participated in conferences.
Our experience shows that in order to launch a business in a new region, it's important to be in the same time zone with companies, to be able to meet and discuss important issues in person. That's what we did with Maestra. All leading project managers are on the ground, they have the opportunity to communicate and meet with clients.
Maestra is an all-in-one marketing automation platform built just for midsize retail. The platform works in real-time and enables brands to run complex omnichannel campaigns, personalized promotions, web and mobile personalization using a single comprehensive tool enriched with powerful AI-based customer segmentation and product recommendations.
What's your current role at Maestra?
I continue to be involved in marketing, I am also leading the team responsible for Customer Success, I analyze the market and look for ways to help our clients optimize the marketing tools they are currently using.
For example, in the US, they actively use MMS, and invest in Google and Meta advertising accounts. We have successfully integrated these tools into our platform. Furthermore, we've managed to automate marketing for a number of US companies—German Kabirski, Panasonic, REKS, The PuffCuff, Blossom Flower Delivery and others.
For METRO: Cash & Carry , for example, we automated the collection of customer data across their offline, online store and mobile app. To do this, we categorized them and set up communication flows depending on the customer actions, and also set up hundreds of personalized email, mobile push notifications and SMS communications. All of it has let METRO increase the share of CRM marketing efforts in the total profit from 11% to 20%, create a consistent email customer base and attract 142 thousand new customers.
As for PuffCuff, we helped them reduce their marketing tech stack costs by 73% and their cost per customer acquisition via Facebook Ads by 44%. Before switching to Maestra, PuffCuff used multiple tools to communicate with their customers and didn't use their first-party data to enhance performance in paid media. We centralized communications within one platform and set up customer segments based on purchase history and behavioral patterns and then used them to create audiences in Meta.
I utilized practices and strategies that I've developed over my years in marketing as part of my collaborations with these companies. In order to share my experience and help other marketers, I put it all together in a book called Direct Marketing Automation Guide. It summarizes key tools that a company can implement even without the help of a contractor and increase their profits dramatically.
In your opinion, what companies find this book most useful?
I am sure the book can be useful for any company in the retail and e-commerce segment. The techniques I'm talking about are pretty universal, they suit both small and large companies, and it's possible to run them in-house, without the help of Maestra.
All the techniques I describe within the book are categorized into 3 levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. All the flows I suggest can be scaled gradually as the company's capabilities allow.
I also provide a bunch of different case studies from real companies such as Miele, Incanto, L'Oreal, and others that have successfully implemented our products. The map has A/B tests to compare the company's performance (before and after implementing marketing techniques). This helps to better understand how profit figures can be improved.
Today Direct Marketing Automation Guide is already used by marketers of leading companies, and our clients and partners are familiar with it.
Can you give an example of a tool you analyze in the book?
For instance, a technique used to retain a customer who has abandoned the purchase: they added goods to the cart, but didn't go further than that and left the website.
The book provides a description of a potential sequence of a company's actions to retain the customer and motivate them to make a purchase. There are also some additional tips from my personal experience. United Colors of Benetton, for example, sends customers an SMS instead of email with an additional promo code for an extra discount if they abandon a cart with extremely high value.
There is also an example A/B test with evaluation criteria for each technique. Companies will have a chance to test several ideas on their own, compare them and determine the best one.
